We've still have such a beast here, and I'm trying to set up a baseline
of required patches for current kernels in order to get a running
configuration out of the box.
Prior to the 2.6.15-rc1 import into linux-mips git, X was only useable
if some variant of the gbefb patch at
http://home.tal.org/~milang/o2/patches/ was used. The symptom was that
the X server would start and appear to be running, but you would only
have a black screen as the output. There was the additional oddity that
even with this patch applied, X would do the old black screen thing for
anybody with greater than 256mb, but less than 768mb of RAM (introduced
by the ip32 full memory patch which went into the linux-mips tree in the
past year or so). In 2.6.15, now we only need the following change for
X to work, and there seems to be no restrictions on the amount of RAM
under which X will run:
--- drivers/video/gbefb.c.orig 2005-11-22 09:26:05 -0500
+++ drivers/video/gbefb.c 2005-11-22 08:16:58 -0500
@@ -1244,7 +1244,7 @@
(void *)gbe_tiles.cpu, gbe_tiles.dma);
release_mem_region(GBE_BASE, sizeof(struct sgi_gbe));
iounmap(gbe);
- gbefb_remove_sysfs(dev);
+ gbefb_remove_sysfs(&p_dev->dev);
framebuffer_release(info);
return 0;
Another oddity which has plagued gbefb on O2 is that allocating more
than 4mb of memory to gbefb causes it to fail outright. The kernel will
boot and userland comes up, but the framebuffer never initializes.
Currently, the only VisWS mode that works under X11 is Depth 15bit,
using the 2 byte/16bit ARGB5 mode in sgivwfb.c, with 1280x1024
or higher with the 1600sw LCD panel.
Interesting, because everything I have heard from folks who have tried
to use 1600sw with their O2s say that it doesn't work at all. In any
case, X runs just fine at every single resolution I have tried,
including 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, and 1280x1024. Basically, if you
have a working framebuffer at any particular resolution (I usually pass
it at boot time via something like video=gbefb:1280x1024-16@85), X will
run at that resolution, no problem, since we are just using the fbdev X
driver.
Surprisingly, Depth 16 in
/etc/X11/xorg.conf is not completely OK anymore, perhaps due
to problems with the transparency bit. Anything else like 24
or 8 bit looks decidedly odd, and hard to read at all.
Namely 24/32bit is completely broken, the width of the
display is only 2/3 of the screen, though timing is still OK.
To my knowledge, running X in anything but 15bit depth has never worked
on O2. I have attempted to start my O2 up with gbefb running at various
depths other than 16, and they always fail, defaulting back to 640x480
at 16bpp (or occasionally even hanging the kernel). Attempting to force
some depth in the X config file always screwed things up whenever I
attempted this. Furthermore, it seems like the new modular X.org is
smarter about probing the framebuffer capabilities, and totally ignores
the depth you specify in xorg.conf, defaulting straight to 15.
Back to the question: What mode(s) are usable on a Linux O2?
Did 24bit work at ANY time on the O2?
Not as far as I can tell.
-Steve
